User:GreenMeansGo/sandbox/GolfballZ

This is just my own example of one way of contributing to talk pages that I've found useful, especially on contentious articles. It uses two fairy simple templates to suggest specific changes with sources. It can be helpful in a few ways, but is particularly good at keeping the conversation on topic, and centered on specifics.

Below is an excerpt from a discussion on the perennially contentious issue of how many golf balls can fit in a bus.

Example talk page discussion
I propose that we change the following line:

Instead it should read:

We all know Smith was groundbreaking in the field of school bus stuffing. JSTOR and google.scholar show he's been cited over 300 times in each database. But Jayce and Widget's meta-analysis was much more comprehensive and compares Smith to a number of similar studies. Also, their research was notable enough to be the source for a piece in the New York Times. We should also specify that Smith is working with a 40 ft. bus. Stuffing short busses (20-25 ft.) is a completely different field. GolfballZRule 19:55, 28 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I really like your suggestion, but I made a change. There was an error in the Epsom source where the date was inserted twice so I removed it. I also added another study by Palmer. Busses4Lyfe 23:59, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Templates and markup
Copy/Paste:

There are two templates used:

This gives you the nifty blue that helps separate suggested text from discussion about your proposed changes. It also makes the automatically generated content box at the top of the page ignore ==Section headers== that you include in your examples.

Second, at the end of the proposed change include. That will add separate reference lists to each proposal. Otherwise the references will automatically post at the bottom of the page, and worse, get smushed with every other reference on the page. So when it's all said and done, we get this:

The full explanations of these template can be found at Template:Talkquote and Template:Reflist-talk.

Screwups
Running list of ways I've seen this screw up:


 * If you use  in a talkquote it seems to nukes everything. Found while suggesting Manual of Style changes and trying to use
 * I've run into a couple of situations where the contents box randomly decides to recognize section headers in talkquotes. So far I've only seen this happen with one box per page, with all the others being ignored as they should be.

Citation templates
As always, its a good idea to keep the most popular variations of Template:Citation in mind and use them whenever possible: Template:Cite book, Template:Cite web, Template:Cite journal, etc. When you cite using bare WP:BAREURLS or plain text (as I did above), you're just making more work for someone to have to come in behind you and clean up.